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there was an example of the broken financial system on the news last night.

Basically Guinea (IIRC) has some mountains that are 60% pure iron, so the (allegedly corrupt) dictator of Guinea gave the mining rights to an (allegedly dodgy) mining company.

Said company then didn't bother to mine the iron, instead it used the backing of having a huge iron asset to make trades on the markets and made a load of cash that way. Meanwhile the people of Guinea are dirt poor with no hope of even getting jobs digging said iron out of the ground for 10p a day, let alone seeing the extraction of the iron benefit the country's economy.

This is one way of seeing why a financial market that does nothing but deal within itself is a bad thing. If we changed focus so stock markets were tied to something in the real world (eg Microsoft profits, or Apple growth) no matter how tenuous, that you held for some time because of that real-world item's worth wrt the stock then we'd see stock markets become more investment based and less trade based.

We might as well base the stock market on TV shows - you could trade on the love life of some TV character without any difference with how financial companies trade today.

That is a problem with the mining contract (and possibly the corrupt dictator) - not the financial system.

So with paintball you have the fog-issue, running through the woods (depending on the course / company / etc), worrying about ticks (here in NJ), the pellets can hurt when you get hit, etc. Sure, some people love. But I can't fault anyone for not liking it due to the reasons I listed (and there are probably others).

The costs too. Buy a game once and play it hundreds of times vs going to the paintball place and buy supplies and rent space every time. It's even more expensive if you have to rent equipment.